In the inevitable post-Covid inquiry, if it is conducted honestly, it will be found that we lost lives in part because of our over-centralised, ineffective, power-grasping State, obstructive and bureaucratised procurement practises and a refusal by Whitehall to localise, decentralise and delegate. We don't have to look far for the villains.
Public Health England, the woke body whose greatest achievement to date has been to ban smoking in hospital grounds and whose main policy thrust was a campaign against alcohol and sugar, has comprehensively cocked-up Wuhan virus testing, as reported in the Telegraph. With a fantasy aspiration to create a single national testing centre, a fantasy that killed health workers, they have now instructed everyone to switch to commercial tests.
And although the press are giving the government a hard time over shortages of PPE, it really isn't the Health Secretary's job to buy nitrile gloves. Each local health trust, hospitals, the NHS, have their own vast procurement departments - I've seen a figure of over 100,000 buying staff quoted. OK, we should have better maintained a national emergency buffer stock of pandemic gear, but as soon as the virus became apparent in January, these buyers should have been placing orders. And it may emerge that our statist jobsworths delayed buying PPE because of EU public procurement directives that require them to advertise across the EU for 30 days before issuing tender documents then another 30 days to allow tenderers to prepare bids, then a compulsory 'standstill' period, then give themselves another 30 days to evaluate the tenders ... an EU-compliant purchase order can take four or five months between starting the procurement and getting the first delivery. If any dickhead anywhere in our vast health infrastructure has insisted on sticking to EU rules they should be shot.
Everywhere are stories of an innovative, agile and responsive private sector banging on the doors of the State to offer testing, help, assistance, contacts, contracts, gear and lifesaving expertise. And everywhere are stories of official doors being slammed in their faces, of bureaucrats 'hiding behind websites', of unanswered calls, of uncontactable procurement departments, of senior civil servants deaf to advice.
It is clear already that we have been grossly failed by an over-central State. Whitehall is not the model we need. We need deep change in the shape of our government.
29 comments:
Radders, I wish I could share your optimism that the right lessons will be learned...
Ah, but I spent 20 years with everyone telling me we'd never leave the EU, so I'm prepared for another 20 to get Stage II ;)
My local hospital has its own in-house sewing team, normally employed making specialist pressure garments. When they volunteered to make desperately needed scrubs, the response from the trust management was that they would have to source the necessary materials themselves, and any materials would have to be donated, as the trust had no mechanism for buying them. Meanwhile, the media and press ignore the rampant evidence that the management of the NHS is completely disfunctional and have focused on stories of how the Government has fucked up.(Fortunately, a grown-up within the trust's management eventually got involved and the team has now been provided with the necessary materials. However, it is clear that the first response from the bureaucracy was to obstruct an unwanted offer from their own staff.)
The correct lessons will be learnt by looking at what Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, Greece, - and, when more is known China probably did - and maybe by then Russia, and at what most of Mainland Europe did too. In other words, at the places which dealt properly with this menace.
Italy's daily death toll is now only half the UK's.
Any Inquiry, which is premised on the fallacy that the Anglo-Saxon economic model is a version of the laws of physics, and therefore immutable, is a waste of time.
Which is what it would likely be.
IF the Public Enquiry is conducted honestly?
I think we all know the likelihood of that happening. The wagons will be circled.
We already knew that the Westminster/Whitehall model was over-centralised;
obsolete and was failing the majority of the country. The problem is that the Party and Electoral system is so stitched up that there is no way we can force change.
And I am fast losing confidence that a PM who failed to scrap HS2 when there is no business case for it; signed-off Huawei's participation in 5G (against the wishes of our 5-eyes allies) and who encourages us to participate in a weekly worship of the second-rate NHS is going to do what's necessary.
Where did your raging hate of your own country come from?
Seriously!
I'm not a psychiatrist but listening to you I'm beginning to understand what it is that makes people become one
Do hospitals still launder and sterilize stuff made of cloth - gowns, caps, sheets etc, or is it all binned or incinerated?
Time for the Harrogate Agenda then.
Guesswork is difficult. Back on 5th I reckoned the UK would take 25 days to get the death rate down to 300/day. 17 days on we are down to about 750. About where Italy was 20 days ago. I had assumed that having locked down, those who got the virus would be working their way through and because we are 'better' than the Italians we would roll off faster. I was far too optimistic. We look to be 20 days away from 500/day and the roll off looks pretty slow.
By which time France and Spain should be down to around 300/day and Germany down to around 100/day. We Brits look to be around 45 days away from the 300 number. That is my guess for today.
What looks a bit strange on the global graph is China and the USA. China looks to have rolled off very fast. Curious to know why. And the USA does not look to be high enough. Some reports say they got a 'weak' strain. More to see there.
By early June we will have seen how the rest of Europe has got on, Hancock and PHE will show us their 'best', Boris will be back in the saddle (or not) and The Treasury will have bitten its nails down to the knuckles.
@JPM
While it is true that the Italian daily death rate is currently lower that the UK death rate that is just the differences in the timing of the peak of the epidemic.
As of yesterday the number of Italian total deaths was reported as 24,648, those of the UK 17,337.
Rather unsound to use the single daily statistic to draw a conclusion about the UK response don't you think? Or do you not care?
Before commenting on the daily death rates can we find some reliable and honest number of actual deaths-BY-covid and not the (seemingly) fabricated-to-keep-the-scare-going figures we see bandied about on a daily basis?
Taking the numbers at face value they are still within any annual infectious disease range and quotes for the 1968 (Hong Kong flu) rates would seem to put the current crisis into perspective. I don't recall a country-wide shut down then.
"...as the trust had no mechanism for buying them..."
Reminds me of a story recounted, I think, by Dennis Norden (or it might have been Frank Muir). Muir and Norden, having become used to being paid late (or very late) for scripts by the BBC were delighted one day to receive a cheque which overpaid them for a piece of work. They banked the cheque. Some time later they received a letter from the BBC requesting repayment of the excess. They replied that, "We have no administrative mechanism for repaying this money." There was never any follow up. After all, it was only Licence Payers' money.
jim: There is no mystery as to why the Chinese death rate rolled off so quickly. The Chinese lockdown was extremely strict and the Chinese authorities forcibly quarantined anybody showing symptoms. We have a fairly relaxed lockdown, no checks on borders and people with symptoms are left to decide for themsleves whether to quarantine or not. The result is that hospital admissions and new cases have plateaued and the death rate is only declining very slowly. I agree it will be June before the numbers start to look reasonable. By then, we will be clearly shown to have the worst public health performance in Europe.
I agree that the USA figures look better than what one might expect.
@JPM - your just wrong. Where did you get your stats from? Here are the COVID world stats by country, updated every day.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Italy currently stands at 24,648. The UK stands at 17,337.
The interesting part is the deaths per million with Belgium above all other countries if you exclude San Moreno (which isn't really a country).
In the end, nobody really knows; it's just that governments around the world are forced to make a call on what action they will take and what they believe the consequences will be down the line in terms of a) deaths b) the economy and c) their respective health care systems being overwhelmed.
In a year or so, the final analysis of which country got it "most right" will prove interesting; but for now, nobody knows and it's anyone's guess.
@Poisonedchalice: Jim was comparing daily death tolls, not totals.
Italy's latest figure is 534 deaths (21st April), for the UK 823 (20th April), although the UK figure is inflated by weekend deaths not being included in the previous two daily totals (596/449).
The statistics department at Oxford appear to have the best analysis of England deaths:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~nuff0078/Covid/index.htm
JPM said @ 07:55
'Any Inquiry, which is premised on the fallacy that the Anglo-Saxon economic model is a version of the laws of physics, and therefore immutable, is a waste of time.'
What's that got to do with the price of fish? The global scrabble for PPE is new to human existence. Got that? New: as in never before. Everything is a psychodrama with you.. because life is so unfair.. only socialism can save us.. but the majority don't want it.. so you'll keep stamping your feet.
Wanker.
Steve
Can we find some reliable and honest number of actual deaths-BY-covid"
If you didn't already know, Hector Drummond is doing sterling work investigating the figures:
https://hectordrummond.com/
@ jim "Some reports say they got a 'weak' strain"
I remember reading (recently) that there are actually 3 strains, which have been identified in different geographical areas of the world.
DJK, you mean JPM, not Jim, Jim seems a balanced lefty with decent debate and points to add. JPM is a troll and does hsi best trolling. Like Mark above says, it is hard to understand how or where such hatred of one's country comes from.
Re detahs, it seem the UK gov is doing everything to kill off oldies: from a doctor: If this is true it is ridiculous (and disgraceful)
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/04/21/the-anti-lockdown-strategy/
And as ever Dave_G bangs the drum of how wrong our numbers are anyway. COVID is now an official casue of death whereas flu, colds, pnuemonia even are not.
Getting back to Raedwald's argument for decentralised government. This idea bothers me a lot, a bit like spreading the same virus we have in Whitehall more widely. The political animal seems to develop the 'lie like a lawyer' skillset and it seems to take an awful lot of effort to pin down even one of the bas%^rds, let alone thousands spread around the country. The work involved in keeping a devolved government 'straight' would be immense, short of a firing squad In don't see how.
Our American friends have a devolved system. But even down at the local level national politics affects. Even selecting a new schoolteacher becomes a political issue. Resolved by allowing Buggins' Turn. The Republicans get to choose one and the Democrats the next. They only fight seriously when the Headship comes up. Take this to the fire department, the police and the town hall and you have an ugly mess.
Personally I feel the problem has at its root an adversarial legal system and adversarial politics. I would prefer we burned the Houses of Parliament to the ground, shredded Erskine May and started again with a Judicial Code , a written constitution, a Great Hall of the People and behind every Minister a hired thug instructed to smash in the skull of any liar. How is that for a reasonable lefty.
Swiss governance model works well.
Almost everything decided at canton level.
Loads of local referenda(?) which are binding.
Devolution which has happened in UK has meant less is decided at local level, i.e. natzis in scotland have centralised everything they could touch in edinburgh, typical lefty behaviour really - projection.
Whoops!
https://davidallengreen.com/2020/04/the-extraordinary-sir-simon-mcdonald-clarification-a-guided-tour/
Having a competent government that the vast majority of citizens trust makes a difference. Watch to the end for amusing story about how to prevent panic buying and trace accountability to rumour mongers.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1252588694147457026
Whatever happened to Saint James of Dyson and his magic ventilators?
All gone quiet, it seems.
Oh, hang on. The thirty patients in Nightingale apparently don’t need them - according to the 150 doctors there anyway.
@billy marlene. I’m guessing you would be the first to complain if there was not enough. I bet your normal job is chief sycophant.
Billy Marlene,
PHE got involved, still can't agree a specification with GTech or Dyson, but PHE are still getting paid and racking up pension credits so they're still happy
Thanks Ness.
I think my point was that Dyson has the media interest. one might say obsession. in spite of, and for whatever reason, Dyson has come nowhere near the claimthat he would somehow ‘adapt’ his core technology to suit.
And this was swallowed whole.
Meanwhile quietly, and below the radar, professional companies like Inspiration Healthcare are continuing to supply their approved critical care ventilators following two direct NHS orders (£1.2m for Ambulances and £5m to Hospital Trusts) about a month ago when the shortage was first notified.
But IH does not have the public name recognition of ‘Dyson’.
Indeed, ask a ventilator manufacturer to produce a cyclone vacuum cleaner quickly and see how they would do.
Can't really blame Dyson, GTech or anybody else though, given that their businesses have, to a significant degree, been closed by dictating.
Publicity, why not? Self serving message of hope has to better than self serving messages of zombie apocalypse. In this they are mere imps against the satan of the lamestream media.
UK universities need to produce a new cadre of students equipped to handle red tape. That would have avoided the paperwork fiasco up that held up PPE imports from Turkey.
Brexit upside for the higher education sector.
"We need deep change in the shape of our government"
You can say that again...
https://coronavirus.blackstonechambers.com/new-lockdown-restrictions-clarification-or-confusion/
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